A’s Oakland history told in documentary form through the eyes of the fan base.
Matt Dooley produced a documentary that debuts Saturday night about the A’s fan base called “The Last Game.”
A’s Oakland history told in documentary form through the eyes of the fan base.
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CASTRO VALLEY — When Matt Dooley began filming a documentary chronicling the 57-year history of the A’s in Oakland and the fans that supported them, he did so without knowing how it would end.
“In 2023, we didn’t know which way it was going to go,” Dooley said in a phone interview this week.
For one thing, it ended up with a new name. The original title was “For the Love of the Game,” with apologies to the 1999 fictional baseball film starring Kevin Costner as an aging pitcher.
When it premieres at the Chabot Theater Saturday night (there are no tickets remaining for a free showing) in Castro Valley, the end result is “The Last Game.” It’s a nearly hour-long documentary through the lens of longtime fans through each decade the A’s resided in Oakland starting in 1968.
A screenwriter and documentarian, Dooley grew up an A’s fan in his youth in Castro Valley pretending to be Barry Zito. At 31, the former Castro Valley High and Cal-Poly San Luis Obispo graduate is too young to have watched the three-time World Series winners under owner Charlie Finley and was born five years before the Loma Prieta earthquake interrupted a four-game sweep by the A’s of the Giants in 1989.
“Going back to the late 60s and 70s and up to the 80s, 90s and the 2000s, we really wanted to find voices from those decades with first-hand accounts of what it was like,” Dooley said.
Voices like Steve Watkin, who went to his first A’s game in their inaugural season of 1968 at age 7 and “was hooked.” Or Joe Wolfcale, whose father came to the Bay Area in the Navy and began taking his son to games on a regular basis. Wolfcale, who remembers fans riding on top of an Amtrak train through Jack London Square after a victory parade, became a longtime Coliseum employee. Or Rob Roberts of Lodi, who has an A’s memorabilia and bobblehead collection — he builds his own bobbleheads — that has to be seen to be believed.
“Every piece has a story,” Roberts said. “It’s not like I buy this stuff just to buy it. I was there for a lot of moments, and this is my connection to it.”
Anthony Villias, a fan since the 1980s, had his name on the scoreboard for an essay he wrote for a club reading program and received a personal letter from pitcher Dave Stewart and got to meet Reggie Jackson.
“If the A’s wanted me to read, I’m going to read,” Villias said. “Everyone was down on our ballpark and organization but it was us versus everybody. That’s kind of an Oakland feeling.”
Villias remembers crying in his mother’s arms after Jose Canseco was traded in mid-game to the Texas Rangers for Ruben Sierra.
Todd Schwenk, wearing a garish all-yellow suit, summed up being an A’s fan like this:
“A’s fans have considered ourselves to be unwanted children, the bastard step-child. But we had grit, we had guts and we took being underestimated to our advantage. To a large degree, that’s how Oakland is to San Francisco and San Jose. The Coliseum wasn’t a baseball park, it was a community event center. It was where Oakland came to party.”
To locate fans for the documentary, Dooley worked with A’s fan groups.
“We put out some general feelers on line to see who might be interested in sharing their stories with us,” Dooley said. “We were seeking people who had personal memories to re-tell.”
The result is a grass roots documentary in which no players or management were interviewed.
“I think there’s a lot of sports documentaries out there that talk about memorable games and star athletes or big moments like the World Cup or World Series,” Dooley said. “But for us, the large part of the narrative has been a unique fandom and the love they have for this specific team.”
The A’s traded popular players with regularity but still managed to remain competitive until the bottom fell out for good in 2022 after various ballpark proposals had fallen through — the last being Howard Terminal — and much of the fan base boycotted the product as to not give any money to owner John Fisher.
With Sacramento a reality and the club insisting it is on track to be in Las Vegas, a sense of grim reality has begun to set it even if the brotherhood and sisterhood among the fans persists. As evidenced by a well attended Fans Fest 2025 in Oakland Saturday, many fans will still see each other at games of the Pioneer League Oakland Ballers as well as the men’s and women’s soccer teams, the Roots and Soul.
“I just want A’s fans to know it’s not our fault,” Villias said. “I won’t be watching anymore, and I think I’ll miss that sense of community. I just want A’s fans to know it’s not our fault. It was things above us, politics, money. But I’ll always love the Oakland A’s.”
The documentary concluded with a montage from Sept. 26, 2024, with the A’s beating the Texas Rangers 3-2 before a crowd of 46,899 at the last home game. And a musical so-long from the East Bay band Tower of Power, with its 1972 hit “So Very Hard to Go” that will have long-time Oakland die-hards reaching for a tissue.
“The last game was really painful,” Wolfcale said. “There were random fans that were in tears and they made me cry because it was the same thing I was experiencing. I’d grab ’em and I didn’t even know ’em and say it was going to be OK. We sent everybody home happy on one final sad day.”
Dooley hopes the documentary can provide some relief amid the grief.
“I think it’s kind of a powerful, unfortunate ending for a lot of fans and through the experience of interviewing them and having them share their thoughts, I hope our project can be somewhat of a catharsis for folks who are looking for answers and what comes next,” Dooley said.
Note: Information regarding free public theater showings of “The Last Game” can be found at @thelastgamedoc on Instagram. Dooley has an additional project on World War I “Across the Border” scheduled to be released into the film festival circuit and has two other short films completed — a Western called “The Painter” and a horror film called “Let Me In.”